Sunday, June 22, 2014

Paul Schneble recently pointed me to a couple of interesting inspection cars not unlike our own. The first is a Rock Island unit, #564. I'll leave it to you to tell me what type of automobile this is. It appears to have the same general sort of narrow treads and steel flanges as ours.

I wonder if the brooms on the Rock Island car are in front of the tires, rather than on the rails. Maybe they are designed to brush debris off the ties so the tires aren't punctured or ride up and take the flange off the rail.

The brooms are most definitely just above the rails, in front of the tires. Similar devices (like small plows) are pretty standard on "speeder" motorcars. Since these vehicles are light they want to knock any debris off the rails that can lift the wheels. I'm not sure how well they work in accumulated snow, but the plows or guards on speeders tend to be on torsion springs so they will just bend in to the wheels if they encounter too much of an opposing force.

The car in the picture has a very deep "center sill", to coin a phrase, that doesn't appear on any pictures of an ordinary road-worthy '36 Fordor. I wonder what purpose it was supposed to serve? The bars on our Milwaukee Road car are much more obviously designed to keep the car from being damaged by landing on a rail in the case of a derailment.

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The "Hicks Locomotive and Car Works" banner at the top is taken from original artwork of the company, which was in business from 1897 to 1911. The picture behind it shows the four restored CA&E wood cars at the Museum, starting with #309, which was built by the Hicks Locomotive and Car Works in 1907.

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